Learning to teach low-SES (socioeconomic status) pupils through assessment in China

Abstract

This case study describes for one rural school in China how pre-service teachers perceived their rural students and how they learned to focus on the test-related activities through the collaborative work with their intern colleagues and mentors. As this study explains, pre-service teachers learned from their mentors and support each other in learning to teach. I find that such professional collaboration sometimes promote teachers learning how to work with lower achieving students more effectively and offer them more cognitively demanding knowledge. This is referred to as “teaching through assessment”. Yet, some pre-service teachers in this study support each other in becoming more skilled in “teaching for assessment”, as well as in explicitly distinguishing between higher achieving and lower achieving students.